Bacteria: A Key to Anti-Cocaine Vaccination

April 24, 2017

Only four years ago, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that about 1.4 million Americans were currently using cocaine—a slow decline from 1.5 million American users of cocaine the year before. It’s difficult to successfully fight and win against cocaine addiction, and researchers have been trying to design a (non-addictive) drug to help cocaine users fight this addiction.

How does cocaine work in the body? Though there are various ways a user may take cocaine, it ultimately reaches the blood and circulates in the body. The cocaine then reaches and enters the brain, whereit binds to specific areas that complement its own shape, creating the “high” the user experiences.

But Lockner et al. may have found the key to this puzzle: the tail of bacteria. They isolated and modified the tail of bacteria to carry a drug that—with the help of alum, the drug’s “sidekick” that amplifies the drug’s effect by speeding up the process—would stimulate our own immune system to mass produce antibodies specific to cocaine. The antibodies would both draw cocaine away from the brain and mark them for destruction by our own immune system.

This is a vaccine against cocaine and its high.

The development of this treatment is still preliminary, however. Lockner et al. report the optimal dose based on their research but acknowledge that more research must be done to verify and further optimize this treatment plan. Further, the use of alum to carry and amplify drugs, though universally accepted in the scientific and medical community and well-regulated, is dicey due to the fine balance between its benefit as an amplifier and its toxicity to infants and children.

Gavin Shih majors in biochemistry at UCSD, though he studies all sorts of topics. His greatest recent achievement was realizing just how little time he had to do everything he wants. Now he struggles with balancing the things most important to him. His current strategy includes spending his free time inventing challenging problems to solve and eating out with those he misses most.